But now, she would not paint for she did not need it to support and pull herself back as if she were the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Her foundation, she told herself, was not as tenuous as this. And even though she was a true woman for him, catering to family matters and allowing herself to be his whore (he asking her questions about men she slept with so that it would excite him enough to maximize his pleasure when impaling within her) she told herself that she could do it without needing art as a crutch. She was a true woman as he liked it and yet had her own sense of being fully Gabriele within her own head. Painting would merely be a prop of a weak feminist. Yes, she could have told him that she had her art, that focus of the realm of ideas that had been her vocation before he moved in with her, and he would have scowled discreetly, never criticizing its odd feral qualities directly. But she would not have believed herself to be an artist anyhow since expressions were being effaced in each new day of life's mundane inconsequentiality.
She just gave him a wry smile and shrugged her shoulders. Too busy: the phrase was air above her lips and it just hovered there like the gossamer smoke strewn in the branches from Hispanic Betty's burning of leaves. She didn't dare say anything. She just let off a whiff of air. With head in denial, she silently repudiated that the school was even being constructed let alone finished, and that the two pupils who put motion and a sense of being busy into her life would soon be gone. She didn't want to discuss any of it. Still the school opened, not being subservient to her solipsistic thoughts. Its opening brought to her regret that she had chosen to not work there and that a role and an interaction with others, which had so easily defined her, would no longer be there to cling to. She had circumscribed her yearnings to go on with teaching, was now miserable, but believed that not prostituting herself in high school psychology classes or elementary school finger painting had been the right choice. Wounded not by vacuous stretches of hours but by the severing of this habit to place meaning and happiness on one's role and interaction with others, hers was a battered retreat. She withdrew into her own books to not be entirely lost unto herself and she knew that knowledge contained there was one step toward building herself apart from the addiction to the chaos and motion of others. She again returned to the nothingness from whence she came. She sometimes sat in her studio with a carton of Swenson's ice cream on her lap reading books on owls like any good ornithologist, got nebulous readings of Tarot cards that she smacked into Celtic designs on her bed, or sometimes drew funny faces on the patio with the chalky edges of rocks. Feeling discontent if left alone for five minutes and incrementally disconcerted for every minute beyond ten, she often interrupted Hispanic Betty to ask what she was doing as if housework were pantomime and the gestures could only be guessed at. The days were invariably long and despite their plodding movements they clunked into each other like two emaciated furless dogs in Thailand that were enervated and stupefied by starvation and blindness.
She questioned who this MF was. The boys were easier: the preferable one who had not come from her womb purred more often than he whined and the one with the demanding mouth railed and complained in less of a dual personality than the former but on the pettiest of things from her forgetting to buy him Pop Tarts to Hispanic Betty's abuse of toilet paper; however both could be easily characterized as egocentric toy soldiers who beat their drums chaotically when their batteries needed recharging or a TV advertisement had indelibly branded a "need" onto their brains. The other one (this Michael, this MF, this Mr. Phlegmatic) she knew in multi-interpretable bits for all her intimacies with him. She knew that he was glad that Rick now had a mother but this might have just indicated that he was glad to have some woman chauffeur his kid to after-school activities and take the kid clothes-shopping so that he did not need to do it. She knew that he claimed to be pleased that Rick now had a surrogate brother who might "toughen him up a bit" but this was ironic since the only one he beat with his belt was Nathaniel (except for occasional S&M sessions with her, and during that time she would struggle to gain the mastery of the belt, and it was she who more often then not would be the sadist). She knew that he had taken the boys to an amusement park a week ago when she was going through what she believed he thought of as an imaginary sickness, and yet she wasn't sure if it was from love that he removed all noise away from her or from simple indifference and neglect. Inconsequential facts littered her mind about Michael (facts like him giving his aunt a poinsettia every Christmas or that he liked to sodden his eggs with mustard), but was this inconsequentiality the real summation of the man? Was she, his woman, in such a needy state of mind that facts like this and the manipulative power of sexual pleasure so much more enhanced when with another should posed themselves as intimacy. Was this the epitome of a woman? It might be; but then, she told herself, she was a female and not a woman, and that she was a goddess and not a mere mortal. Her love of him, she judged, was a few facts mixed in fantasies begotten in neediness. What she asked and chose to know about him and the feeling of love she mixed as color on her pallet to spread around these facts were her own invention. She decided that she did not know him at all.
Her mind would not rest it there. She continued to think, "His obsession with viewing his watch could be from nervous energy instead of a desperate wish to succeed at every turn — who knows? His change to a CEO instead of an educator could be interpreted as a wish to make the educational experience everything that it should be so who am I to say that he is a derelict to values I was attracted to. His buying of other businesses and doing whatever it is he does shows industriousness and the desire to leave something to his children." She said these things to convince herself that she did not have a stranger who slept in her bed. But then she thought, "Even if he is a stranger — there have been lots of strangers in my bed. Should I chase him away out of a fear that we are all strangers?"
This enjoyment of hearing his footsteps on the linoleum when he stepped into her home, his smell within the cologne he wore, the pleasure he gave her (now less synchronized to her needs, now more male banging, but still pleasurable), the beautiful black eyes that were hard and virile, sideburns on his handsome, swarthy face, virile hair on the nape of his neck and as abundant growth on his fertile chest, and a general masculine handsomeness that told a woman, that breeding with him would grant unto her beautiful babies with little or no chance of deformities—these things were the most primordial instinctual drives of attraction and bonding that made her love him but still she did not think that these things were so much him as they were the promptings of a woman's breeding.
He was a busy little entrepreneur opening a fitness center with his Russian friend one month, an Internet cafe the next, and some minor investments in between that she knew less about. He did whatever he did throughout the day. Questioning him about his schedule annoyed him in his taciturn ways. She was made to feel that he did not want business to intrude on his personal domain or the personal domain to intrude on business but that, she knew, might just be her own positive interpretation. For what she knew there might be another woman. She didn't own a man's body. He could do with it whatever he wished so long as he didn't bring any disease to her. She told herself that jealousy was a primitive instinct of men warding off the responsibilities of babies that weren't composed in part by their own DNA, women who did not want to lose income, that food of the hunt, for themselves and their kids, and both sexes wanting to ensure that their bed partners were slavishly loyal at assisting their pleasures. She told herself that she was beyond such absurd human foibles as jealousy.
And yet she did not know who she was: she was now not even a teacher—just one more person groping around lost and clinging to others and, to a much lesser degree now, the commotion of the days, in order to be cognizant of being at all. She did not want to think of him, herself, or the demise of her higher authority nearly a year ago, and how like a good captain her higher authority had bravely gone down the toilet with her reefer ship. She thought again about the boys. Children were often thought of as callow adults making their inchoate journeys into adulthood. To her, adulthood was not superior to childhood: it was just two of the four links of recycled life no less purposeful than any raindrop slapping into the surface of a river which would then ooze back into the ocean before slowly being evaporated back from whence it came.
Sitting on the patio doodling on the concrete with the chalk of rock in her right hand and left hand like Moses holding back the waters of drool that came from her affectionate beasts, she felt the beginning of what she could tell would be an intense migraine. She tried to ease her apprehension by joking to herself that it would be no more than a seven or eight quake on the Gabriele scale and yet the foreboding knowledge of her vulnerability was exacerbating the pain and making her body rigid. In that sense it was a bit psychosomatic. She went inside to take one of her pills that never did her much good. The water was more immediately beneficial. She drank it voraciously to lubricate her dry throat.
As she was drinking her water she heard the lonely howls of Rick's dog. Disregarding simple pleasures, which should have slid down the apertures of a being's senses and filled lonely vacuous gray matter with curiosity and awe, this dog was fixated on her. It "needed" her. Domesticated creatures were so needy and clinging but she was reluctant to disparage this behavior as altogether delusional since she could not even disabuse herself of such inane notions. It probably was delusional but it still deserved sympathy, and so she once again went out to be with these dogs. Was this the only meaning of life, she asked herself, this soothing of imagined mental travail? She believed that it was. She picked up Rick's halitosis harried hound and took it into her bedroom—the cat, Mouse, having succumbed to cancer shortly after she returned from Europe and its body placed in a shoe box that was buried in the forest behind the house. She went to her bed and had the dog lay at her feet. She pressed her palm on her forehead and closed her eyes. "In Biblical times," she thought in an attempt to recall, think through, and solidify to long-term memory what she had read, "one of the fairest of fowl was the owl. The historical origin of the owl is, of course, the historical origin of the bird which probably evolved from one of two groups of dinosaurs, the—oh shit, I can't remember— during the early part of the Jurassic period. The term, Preavisanussyphilus or I don't know what, is applied to flying reptiles. Some…what's the word…ornithologists—some ornithologists say the earliest bird was a tree dwelling reptile which began flight by gliding from one branch to another although other experts say that it was a running, leaping, terrestrial animal which gradually increased the length of its leaps by the use of long forelimbs. After the appearance of Archaeopteryx Lithographica, the first known bird, the myriad species descended from it. It is hard to isolate when the first owls evolved. The first owl may have come out of the Cenozoic era of 70 to 40 million years ago if not the latter part of the Mesozoic era, which was 135 to 70 million years ago. The Mesozoic era was characterized by large seas, lakes, deltas with deserts, and occasional glaciers. If the owls came out of this period it was when the last of the dinosaurs were dying out. The Cenozoic era had volcanic activity and geological unrest. The environment was — " She couldn't concentrate. She wasn't confident of her facts. They were like sand falling through her fingers. She went downstairs into the kitchen, took another pill with some cola, and then fixed some burnt toast but the idea of buttering it seemed so nauseous to her that she ate it bare. Then she went back to her bedroom, feeling as mad as the pharaoh, Akhenaten (or Akhenaton) who purportedly worshiped the sun in his desert utopia until he was fully mad.
Her shadow on a wall in the hallway when passing into the bathroom to vomit seemed fey and she somehow felt subordinate to its alien presence. She felt so needy and wanted the shadow that was Michael, the last vestige of something somewhat real, to merge into her shadow to give it pulp and tangibility that she, who was less than her shadow, entirely lacked. She wanted the virile male shadow to stifle her thoughts, to free her from ever becoming old, and to shoo away loneliness and meaninglessness — an aloneness pesky as that incessant fly landing on that shiny nose of hers and as meaningless as a sedentary stick insect spending its life camouflaged as an inanimate object. She vomited before she got the lid up and the colors looked like the hard, tactile brushstrokes of thick orange palpable paint of a Van Gogh. Both her trembling head and her strained and feral vomiting moans seemed to be to the rhythms of Chopin's Funeral March.